If no one else will stand up to what President Obama just said about bigotry, I WILL…

Wednesday marked the 150th anniversary of the end of slavery in the United States and was recognized by a speech from President Obama. However, let’s be very honest, the irony is striking. It was 150 years ago that a Republican president stepped forward to tackle the issue, even while the Civil War raged. It was in 1854 that the GOP was created for a single issue, the abolishment of slavery. It was a Republican House of Representatives, led by Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, that fought for the 13th Amendment against the fervent opposition of the Democrat party. And so it was that the 14th and 15th Amendments followed, passed by a Republican-led Congress.

When the Congress changed hands, it was under Democrat leadership that civil rights legislation was challenged. We saw the rise of Jim Crow and the prominence of the Ku Klux Klan. Some are even coming to realize the abject racism of President Woodrow Wilson, under whom the heinous practice of lynchings grew. I believe Wilson even viewed the film, “The Birth of a Nation,” which promoted the Klan and its activities. So let’s be honest and embrace not the revisionist history some would advance, but actual history.

And true to form, President Obama did not hesitate to inject politics in his remarks for the occasion.

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President Barack Obama on Wednesday took a veiled swipe at Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, who has called for blocking Muslims from entering the United States in the aftermath of terror attacks at home and abroad.

Speaking at a Capitol Hill ceremony marking the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, Obama detailed the efforts of previous generations to fight discrimination, and said Americans today must be willing to do what they did – namely, “to remember that our freedom is bound up with the freedom of others, regardless of what they look like, or where they come from, or what their last name is or what faith they practice.”

The president said Americans will betray their past if “we were to deny the possibility of movement, the possibility of progress, if we were to let cynicism consume us and fear overwhelm us.” He said the country would do a disservice to “warriors of justice” like Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, President Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., if it denies the scars of the “nation’s original sin” are still there today.

“We betray the efforts of the past if we fail to push back against bigotry in all its forms,” Obama said.

I will give Mr. Obama credit — at least he gave credit to a litany of Republicans, but he also should’ve mentioned Booker T. Washington as a “warrior of justice” who did phenomenal work to advance better education, entrepreneurship and self-reliance for the black community.

However, let’s ask ourselves this question: how has the Democrat Party advanced a new form of slavery on the modern 21st century economic plantation?

It’s been the GOP that has always been a champion of individual economic empowerment. Today, the progressive socialists who own the Democrat Party are promulgating the aspect of collective economic enslavement. And nowhere is that more evident than in the black community.

Since the infamous “Great Society” policies of Lyndon Johnson, look at the appalling indicators that have crept into the urban black community. We’ve witnessed the two-parent household in the black community go from approximately 77 percent to an astonishing 25 percent. With the massive rise of the out-of-wedlock birth rate in the black community has come a flurry of second- and third-order unintentional — or possibly intentional — consequences.

When the government stepped in and gave largesse to young women having children out of wedlock — as long as they didn’t have the responsible male in the home — the government created black male irresponsibility. That, in turn, has led to an explosion of young black male incarceration rates, due to the lack of positive black male role models – i.e, dads.

Along with that has been the emphasis on maintaining failing public schools in the urban centers, which deny the greatest tool to ensure success and opportunity: quality education. Sadly, the current Democrat Party favors the teachers unions more than the children. Consider the October charter school rally in Brooklyn, New York — which we shared here — where nearly 18,000 came out to “End Education Inequality.”

And don’t forget that the majority of Historical Black Colleges and Universities were funded and assisted in establishment by wealthy GOP philanthropists. We also shared the funding scholarships provided to the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) by the Koch Foundation. And from that piece you saw that the unions complained and vowed to retract their support to the UNCF — nothing like some good ol’ modern day education discrimination.

But probably the most alarming point of all is the modern metaphysical enslavement of the Democrat Party when it comes to the issue of life. Records and statistics place the number of blacks who lost their lives during the despicable period of slavery in America between 2 and 3 million.

Horrifically, since the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision, the number of black babies that have been murdered stands somewhere between 13 and 15 million. And it was President Obama, who, when a State Senator in Illinois, championed legislation promoting infanticide — stating that a child who survived an abortion procedure still deserves to be put to death.

In his Gettysburg Address, Lincoln sought to ensure the words of Thomas Jefferson would reign true for all. The first unalienable right Jefferson stated, that was endowed by our Creator, was life — only after we respect and honor the individual right to life can we advance liberty and the individual pursuit of happiness.

When you consider the economic policies of Barack Obama and the liberal progressive left, it’s not about the individual pursuit of happiness. It’s about a state-granted collective guarantee of happiness. That is hardly what the 13th Amendment was about.

In the immediate term it was about breaking the physical bonds of the chains of slavery. In the long term, it is about the breaking of the metaphysical chains of economic bondage that allows individuals to thrive, enjoy opportunity and pursue their desired happiness. The incredible explosion of the welfare nanny state under Barack Obama — poverty, food stamps, EBT cards and unemployment insurance — is not in keeping with the highest traditions of what Wednesday was all about: individual freedom.

Sadly, there will be no one who will speak up and say these things. And Obama will, as usual, slide off seemingly unchallenged. Not so fast, my friend!

If ever there was the wrong person, the wrong ideology, and the wrong political party to pay homage to the 13th Amendment — we saw that Wednesday. I pray we never have to see that again.

Meet Allen West

Allen West was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia in the same neighborhood where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once preached. He is the third of four generations of military servicemen in his family.

During his 22 year career in the United States Army, Lieutenant Colonel West served in several combat zones: in Operation Desert Storm, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he was a Battalion Commander in the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, and later in Afghanistan.